Company Management

Farzin Shahidi
Founder and CEO

Farzin is a successful entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the enterprise software and services industry.

Prior to NextPlane, Farzin was Director of Product Management at Cendura. At Cendura he was instrumental in positioning Cohesion as a leading Application Configuration Management solution. Cendura was acquired by CA in 2006.

Previously, Farzin was Director of Product Management at Jareva. At Jareva Farzin managed OpForce, a pioneering Datacenter Automation solution. VERITAS acquired Jareva in 2003. At VERITAS (Now Symantec) Farzin grew OpForce from being a technology acquisition with zero revenue to a $15 million product line in less than two years.

Farzin received a MBA from Drexel University, and a BS in Chemical Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sanjay Pujare
Founder and CTO

Sanjay is responsible for setting the company's overall technical direction and product architecture. Sanjay brings over 20 years of experience developing complex applications, and enjoys a well-deserved reputation for delivering high quality products in a timely, cost effective manner.

Prior to NextPlane, Sanjay was the Director of Engineering at Opsware. Before joining Opsware he managed the engineering team responsible for the OpForce Server Provisioning product line at Jareva (acquired by VERITAS in 2002). Prior to Jareva, Sanjay held senior engineering positions at Omnishift, Web Van, Wind River Systems, HP, IBM, and Unisys.

Sanjay holds a MS in Computer Science from University of Toronto, and a BS Computer Science from IIT Bombay.

Nick Sears
Senior VP Business Development and Sales

Nick is responsible for global sales and business development strategy at NextPlane, including developing enterprise customer, service provider and vendor relationships.

Prior to NextPlane, Nick spent five years as VP Sales, EMEA at Social Media & Unified Communications security and compliance firm Actiance (Formerly FaceTime Communications) where he gained significant expertise in the major UC and Social Media platforms along with associated enterprise deployment challenges regarding federation, security and compliance.

Prior to Actiance, Nick spent five years as EMEA VP Sales and later, President of US operations at Finjan Software (now Trustwave), a secure web gateway solutions vendor.